Angry young men
Encyclopedia
The "angry young men" were a group of mostly working
and middle class
British
playwright
s and novel
ists who became prominent in the 1950s. The group's leading members included John Osborne and Kingsley Amis.The phrase was originally coined by the Royal Court Theatre
's press officer to promote John Osborne's Look Back in Anger
. It is thought to be derived from the autobiography of Leslie Paul
, founder of the Woodcraft Folk, whose Angry Young Man was published in 1951. Following the success of the Osborne play, the label was later applied by British newspapers to describe young British writers who were characterised by a disillusionment with traditional English society. The term, always imprecise, began to have less meaning over the years as the writers to whom it was originally applied became more divergent, and many of them dismissed the label as useless.
which had been in fashion. Osborne's The Entertainer
(1957) secured his reputation, with Laurence Olivier
playing the protagonist Archie Rice.
, who edited a collection of political-literary essays by the "Angries" (Declaration, 1957), commented: "(T)hey do not belong to a united movement. Far from it; they attack one another directly or indirectly in these pages. Some were even reluctant to appear between the same covers with others whose views they violently oppose."
Their political
views were usually seen as identifying with the left, sometimes anarchistic
, and they described social alienation
of different kinds. They also often expressed their critical views on society
as a whole, criticising certain behaviours or groups in different ways. On television, their writings were often expressed in plays in anthology
drama
series such as Armchair Theatre
(ITV
, 1956-68) and The Wednesday Play
(BBC
, 1964-70); this leads to a confusion with the kitchen sink drama category of the early 1960s.
It should also be noted that throughout the late 1950s and into the 1960s, the Angries often met at or were nurtured by the Royal Shakespeare Company
, and through this venue other such emerging playwrights as Edward Bond
and Wole Soyinka
were exposed to the AYM movement directly.
The New University Wits (a term applied by William Van O'Connor in his 1963 study The New University Wits and the End of Modernism), refers to Oxbridge
malcontents who explored the contrast between their upper-class university privilege and their middle-class upbringings. They included Kingsley Amis
, Philip Larkin
, and John Wain
, all of whom were also part of the poetic circle known as The Movement.
Also included in the Angry Young Men was a small group of young existentialist
philosophers led by Colin Wilson
and also including Stuart Holroyd
and Bill Hopkins
.
Outside of these subgroupings, the "Angries" included writers mostly of lower-class origin concerned with their political and economic aspirations. They included John Osborne
(whose play Look Back in Anger
is a basic "Angries" text), Harold Pinter
, John Braine
, Arnold Wesker
and Alan Sillitoe
. Some of these (e.g. Pinter) were left-wing and some (e.g. Braine) were right-wing. William Cooper
, the early model AYM, though Cambridge-educated was a "provincial" writer in his frankness and material and is included in this group.
, author of A Taste of Honey (1958), was described as an "angry young woman" (see Arthur Marwick
(1998) The Sixties).
The perception of them as "angry" outsiders was the one point of coherence. It all had something to do with English "provincialism" asserting itself, in a world where James Joyce
(an Irishman) and Dylan Thomas
(a Welshman) had taken the literary high ground. Feelings of frustration and exclusion from the centre and The Establishment
were taken up, as common sense surrogates for the Freud and Sartre of the highbrows. In a negative description, they tended to avoid radical experimentalism in their literary style; they were not modernists by technique. That much fitted in with the overlapping Movement poets, identified as such a year or two before, also a journalistic label.
, the following lines appear: "Where have all the angry young men gone?/ Barstow and Osborne, Waterhouse and Sillitoe/ Where on earth did they all go?"
Working class
Working class is a term used in the social sciences and in ordinary conversation to describe those employed in lower tier jobs , often extending to those in unemployment or otherwise possessing below-average incomes...
and middle class
Middle class
The middle class is any class of people in the middle of a societal hierarchy. In Weberian socio-economic terms, the middle class is the broad group of people in contemporary society who fall socio-economically between the working class and upper class....
British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
playwright
Playwright
A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...
s and novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
ists who became prominent in the 1950s. The group's leading members included John Osborne and Kingsley Amis.The phrase was originally coined by the Royal Court Theatre
Royal Court Theatre
The Royal Court Theatre is a non-commercial theatre on Sloane Square, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. It is noted for its contributions to modern theatre...
's press officer to promote John Osborne's Look Back in Anger
Look Back in Anger
Look Back in Anger is a John Osborne play—made into films in 1959, 1980, and 1989 -- about a love triangle involving an intelligent but disaffected young man , his upper-middle-class, impassive wife , and her haughty best friend . Cliff, an amiable Welsh lodger, attempts to keep the peace...
. It is thought to be derived from the autobiography of Leslie Paul
Leslie Paul
Leslie Allen Paul was an Anglo-Irish writer and founder of the Woodcraft Folk.-Life:Born in Dublin in April 1905, Leslie Paul grew up in South East London...
, founder of the Woodcraft Folk, whose Angry Young Man was published in 1951. Following the success of the Osborne play, the label was later applied by British newspapers to describe young British writers who were characterised by a disillusionment with traditional English society. The term, always imprecise, began to have less meaning over the years as the writers to whom it was originally applied became more divergent, and many of them dismissed the label as useless.
John Osborne
The playwright John Osborne was the archetypal example, and his signature play Look Back in Anger (1956) attracted attention to a style of drama contrasting strongly with the genteel and understated works of Terence RattiganTerence Rattigan
Sir Terence Mervyn Rattigan CBE was one of England's most popular 20th-century dramatists. His plays are generally set in an upper-middle-class background...
which had been in fashion. Osborne's The Entertainer
The Entertainer (play)
The Entertainer is a three act play by John Osborne, first produced in 1957. His first play, Look Back in Anger, had attracted mixed notices but a great deal of publicity. Having depicted an "angry young man" in the earlier play, Osborne wrote, at Laurence Olivier's request,about an angry middle...
(1957) secured his reputation, with Laurence Olivier
Laurence Olivier
Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier, OM was an English actor, director, and producer. He was one of the most famous and revered actors of the 20th century. He married three times, to fellow actors Jill Esmond, Vivien Leigh, and Joan Plowright...
playing the protagonist Archie Rice.
Definition and divisions
As a catchphrase, the term was applied to a large, incoherently defined group, and was rejected by most of the writers to whom it was applied; see for instance "Answer to a Letter from Joe" by John Wain (Essays on Literature and Ideas, 1963). Publisher Tom MaschlerTom Maschler
Tom Maschler is a British publisher and writer. The son of Austrian Jews, he was five when his family fled the Nazis in Vienna and brought him to England...
, who edited a collection of political-literary essays by the "Angries" (Declaration, 1957), commented: "(T)hey do not belong to a united movement. Far from it; they attack one another directly or indirectly in these pages. Some were even reluctant to appear between the same covers with others whose views they violently oppose."
Their political
Politics
Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, including behavior within civil governments, but also applies to institutions, fields, and special interest groups such as the...
views were usually seen as identifying with the left, sometimes anarchistic
Anarchism
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
, and they described social alienation
Social alienation
The term social alienation has many discipline-specific uses; Roberts notes how even within the social sciences, it “is used to refer both to a personal psychological state and to a type of social relationship”...
of different kinds. They also often expressed their critical views on society
Society
A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations...
as a whole, criticising certain behaviours or groups in different ways. On television, their writings were often expressed in plays in anthology
Anthology
An anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler. It may be a collection of poems, short stories, plays, songs, or excerpts...
drama
Drama
Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "action" , which is derived from "to do","to act" . The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a...
series such as Armchair Theatre
Armchair Theatre
Armchair Theatre is a British television drama anthology series, which ran on the ITV network from 1956 to 1974. It was originally produced by Associated British Corporation, and later by Thames Television after 1968....
(ITV
ITV
ITV is the major commercial public service TV network in the United Kingdom. Launched in 1955 under the auspices of the Independent Television Authority to provide competition to the BBC, it is also the oldest commercial network in the UK...
, 1956-68) and The Wednesday Play
The Wednesday Play
The Wednesday Play was an anthology series of British television plays which ran on BBC1 from October 1964 to May 1970. Every week's play was usually written for television, although adaptations from other sources also featured...
(BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
, 1964-70); this leads to a confusion with the kitchen sink drama category of the early 1960s.
It should also be noted that throughout the late 1950s and into the 1960s, the Angries often met at or were nurtured by the Royal Shakespeare Company
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Royal Shakespeare Company is a major British theatre company, based in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England. The company employs 700 staff and produces around 20 productions a year from its home in Stratford-upon-Avon and plays regularly in London, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and on tour across...
, and through this venue other such emerging playwrights as Edward Bond
Edward Bond
Edward Bond is an English playwright, theatre director, poet, theorist and screenwriter. He is the author of some fifty plays, among them Saved , the production of which was instrumental in the abolition of theatre censorship in the UK...
and Wole Soyinka
Wole Soyinka
Akinwande Oluwole "Wole" Soyinka is a Nigerian writer, poet and playwright. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, where he was recognised as a man "who in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence", and became the first African in Africa and...
were exposed to the AYM movement directly.
The New University Wits (a term applied by William Van O'Connor in his 1963 study The New University Wits and the End of Modernism), refers to Oxbridge
Oxbridge
Oxbridge is a portmanteau of the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge in England, and the term is now used to refer to them collectively, often with implications of perceived superior social status...
malcontents who explored the contrast between their upper-class university privilege and their middle-class upbringings. They included Kingsley Amis
Kingsley Amis
Sir Kingsley William Amis, CBE was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, various short stories, radio and television scripts, along with works of social and literary criticism...
, Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin
Philip Arthur Larkin, CH, CBE, FRSL is widely regarded as one of the great English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century...
, and John Wain
John Wain
John Barrington Wain was an English poet, novelist, and critic, associated with the literary group "The Movement". For most of his life, Wain worked as a freelance journalist and author, writing and reviewing for newspapers and the radio. He seems to have married in 1947, since C. S...
, all of whom were also part of the poetic circle known as The Movement.
Also included in the Angry Young Men was a small group of young existentialist
Existentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
philosophers led by Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
Colin Henry Wilson is a prolific English writer who first came to prominence as a philosopher and novelist. Wilson has since written widely on true crime, mysticism and other topics. He prefers calling his philosophy new existentialism or phenomenological existentialism.- Early biography:Born and...
and also including Stuart Holroyd
Stuart Holroyd
Stuart Holroyd is a British writer.He first came to prominence for the philosophical and critical works produced during his close association with the writers Colin Wilson and Bill Hopkins, but has since written prolifically on parapsychology, contacts with extraterrestrial life, sexual love and...
and Bill Hopkins
Bill Hopkins (novelist)
Bill Hopkins was an English novelist and journalist, and has been grouped with the Angry Young Men. His father was Ted Hopkins, a popular stage performer; his mother Violet Brodrick....
.
Outside of these subgroupings, the "Angries" included writers mostly of lower-class origin concerned with their political and economic aspirations. They included John Osborne
John Osborne
John James Osborne was an English playwright, screenwriter, actor and critic of the Establishment. The success of his 1956 play Look Back in Anger transformed English theatre....
(whose play Look Back in Anger
Look Back in Anger
Look Back in Anger is a John Osborne play—made into films in 1959, 1980, and 1989 -- about a love triangle involving an intelligent but disaffected young man , his upper-middle-class, impassive wife , and her haughty best friend . Cliff, an amiable Welsh lodger, attempts to keep the peace...
is a basic "Angries" text), Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter, CH, CBE was a Nobel Prize–winning English playwright and screenwriter. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party , The Homecoming , and Betrayal , each of which he adapted to...
, John Braine
John Braine
John Gerard Braine was an English novelist. Braine is usually associated with the Angry Young Men movement.-Biography:...
, Arnold Wesker
Arnold Wesker
Sir Arnold Wesker is a prolific British dramatist known for his contributions to kitchen sink drama. He is the author of 42 plays, 4 volumes of short stories, 2 volumes of essays, a book on journalism, a children's book, extensive journalism, poetry and other assorted writings...
and Alan Sillitoe
Alan Sillitoe
Alan Sillitoe was an English writer and one of the "Angry Young Men" of the 1950s.. He disliked the label, as did most of the other writers to whom it was applied.- Biography :...
. Some of these (e.g. Pinter) were left-wing and some (e.g. Braine) were right-wing. William Cooper
William Cooper (novelist)
Harry Summerfield Hoff was an English novelist, writing under the name William Cooper.-Life:H.S.Hoff was born in Crewe, the son of elementary school teachers , and read natural sciences at Christ's College, Cambridge...
, the early model AYM, though Cambridge-educated was a "provincial" writer in his frankness and material and is included in this group.
Cross-currents in the late 1950s
Friendships, rivalries, and acknowledgments of common literary aims within each of these groups could be intense (the relationship between Amis and Larkin is considered one of the great literary friendships of the 20th century). But the writers in each group tended to view the other groups with bewilderment and incomprehension. Observers and critics could find no common thread among them all. They were contemporaries by age. They were not of the upper-class establishment, nor were they protegés of existing literary circles. It was essentially a male "movement". Shelagh DelaneyShelagh Delaney
Shelagh Delaney, FRSL was an English dramatist and screenwriter, best-known for her debut work, A Taste of Honey ....
, author of A Taste of Honey (1958), was described as an "angry young woman" (see Arthur Marwick
Arthur Marwick
Arthur John Brereton Marwick was a professor in history. Born in Edinburgh, he was a graduate of Edinburgh University and Balliol College, Oxford. - Career :...
(1998) The Sixties).
The perception of them as "angry" outsiders was the one point of coherence. It all had something to do with English "provincialism" asserting itself, in a world where James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
(an Irishman) and Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas
Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer, Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 11 January 2008. who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself...
(a Welshman) had taken the literary high ground. Feelings of frustration and exclusion from the centre and The Establishment
The Establishment
The Establishment is a term used to refer to a visible dominant group or elite that holds power or authority in a nation. The term suggests a closed social group which selects its own members...
were taken up, as common sense surrogates for the Freud and Sartre of the highbrows. In a negative description, they tended to avoid radical experimentalism in their literary style; they were not modernists by technique. That much fitted in with the overlapping Movement poets, identified as such a year or two before, also a journalistic label.
Associated writers
- Edward BondEdward BondEdward Bond is an English playwright, theatre director, poet, theorist and screenwriter. He is the author of some fifty plays, among them Saved , the production of which was instrumental in the abolition of theatre censorship in the UK...
- John BraineJohn BraineJohn Gerard Braine was an English novelist. Braine is usually associated with the Angry Young Men movement.-Biography:...
- Michael HastingsMichael Hastings (playwright)Michael Gerald Hastings was a British playwright, screen-writer, and occasional novelist and poet.He is probably best known for his 1984 play about the poet T.S. Eliot and his wife Vivienne Haigh-Wood, Tom & Viv, which became a motion picture released in 1994.Hastings was born in London...
- Thomas HindeThomas Hinde (novelist)Sir Thomas Willes Chitty, 3rd Baronet , better known as Thomas Hinde, is a British novelist.-Life:Thomas Hinde was born in Felixstowe, Suffolk, and educated at Winchester School and University College, Oxford. After service in the Royal Navy, he worked briefly for the Inland Revenue and then for...
- John OsborneJohn OsborneJohn James Osborne was an English playwright, screenwriter, actor and critic of the Establishment. The success of his 1956 play Look Back in Anger transformed English theatre....
- Harold PinterHarold PinterHarold Pinter, CH, CBE was a Nobel Prize–winning English playwright and screenwriter. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party , The Homecoming , and Betrayal , each of which he adapted to...
- Alan SillitoeAlan SillitoeAlan Sillitoe was an English writer and one of the "Angry Young Men" of the 1950s.. He disliked the label, as did most of the other writers to whom it was applied.- Biography :...
- Kenneth TynanKenneth TynanKenneth Peacock Tynan was an influential and often controversial English theatre critic and writer.-Early life:...
- Arnold WeskerArnold WeskerSir Arnold Wesker is a prolific British dramatist known for his contributions to kitchen sink drama. He is the author of 42 plays, 4 volumes of short stories, 2 volumes of essays, a book on journalism, a children's book, extensive journalism, poetry and other assorted writings...
Other media
In the song "Where are they now", on the 1973 album Preservation Act 1 by The KinksThe Kinks
The Kinks were an English rock band formed in Muswell Hill, North London, by brothers Ray and Dave Davies in 1964. Categorised in the United States as a British Invasion band, The Kinks are recognised as one of the most important and influential rock acts of the era. Their music was influenced by a...
, the following lines appear: "Where have all the angry young men gone?/ Barstow and Osborne, Waterhouse and Sillitoe/ Where on earth did they all go?"
See also
- British New WaveBritish New WaveThe British New Wave is the name given to a trend in filmmaking among directors in Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The label is a translation of Nouvelle Vague, the French term first applied to the films of François Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard among others.There is considerable overlap...
, AKA the Angry Young Man film genre- a British film genre of the 1960s, featuring working class heroes and left-wing themes. http://www.sasked.gov.sk.ca/docs/artsed/g10arts_ed/g10m4fgae.html
- Angry Young Men, ltd. An American puppet troupe of mad scientists, impresarios and drinking buddies, creators of Night of the Living Dead, The Puppet Show! http://www.angryyoungmenltd.com/